County Commission Meeting: Goff’s Final Term, Urgent Need for New Power Supply

By LYDIA BERGLAR
News Editor

The Jan. 5 Dade County Board of Commissioners meeting included year-end reports, covered several annual items, and covered approval of SPLOST and ARPA funds. Additionally, Robert Goff (District 3 commissioner and vice chair) officially announced that this will be his final term.

Ted Rumley (county executive) was unable to attend.

The board appointed Tim Fowler to the Water & Sewer Authority board, representing District 2. His four-year term began this month.

Parks and Recreation requested SPLOST funds to replace a lawn mower, and Public Works/Emergency Management Agency (EMA) requested funds for additional snow plow and salt spreading equipment. Alex Case (EMA director) said, “This will give us five total units to attack the roads. The other night, with two and a half trucks, we couldn’t do it all in time.”

EMA also requested funds for a replacement Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) due to a recent failure of the current UPS. The UPS sits in the 911 call center, and failure of the unit can lead to an outage of the call center as well as the entire county government.

According to Case, “This runs our phone system for all of our Dade government buildings. It’s our software for the tax assessors. It feeds all five of these buildings here, the transportation phone system 4-H, the transfer station, and camera systems.”

He continued, “We had a critical fail last Tuesday where a capacitor burned out in the unit that’s been here since 2002. We were real close to evacuating the center in this building. We’ve got some extra precautions in place, but I’m still not comfortable.”

The lower bid of $74,691.66 includes a new large system and a smaller system which would arrive in one week. Case reported, “We looked at a rental system, but that’s not worth throwing our SPLOST dollars away.” The only other quote he was able to get for a new UPS was $106,708.47. The board approved the request.

Regarding ARPA funds, Chief Deputy Tommy Bradford gave an update on the shooting/training simulator for the Dade County Sheriff’s Office. The board pre-approved $100,000 for the building, but materials and details are still being decided. See the Dec. 7 edition of the Sentinel for further details about the simulator.

Regular annual items were the agreement with the public defender’s office, financial authorizations on bank accounts, tax anticipation note-line of credit authorization, memorandums of understanding with the Family Crisis Center and UGA Cooperative Extension/4-H, approval to apply for a Georgia Department of Transportation grant, amendment to the fiscal year 23 budget, and disposal of surplus military Hummers which were donated by the military years ago.

Don Townsend (county clerk) brought to the board’s attention the need to appoint a commissioner representative for the Association of County Commissioners of Georgia, a role which Goff has been filling.

Goff then officially announced that he will not run for re-election. “I’ll just put it simply that tonight begins my last two years on the county commission. I do not intend to run again. My main supporter in not running is, of course, my wife. She’s the one person out of 16,000 who could get me to run, and that ain’t going to happen.”

Goff mentioned the Dec. 28 joint meeting with the city regarding the elections building, but the board did not select members for the subcommittees of either the elections building or the animal shelter.

Case reported the 2022 year-end number of calls transferred out of the 911 center. Calls transferred totalled 35,910, which is about 98 calls per day. The December total was 9,614 with:

• EMS: 608
• Fire: 796
• Law Enforcement: 8,210

The next meeting will be Feb. 2 at 6 p.m.